


Shame

by JustJasper



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Coerced Consent, Consent Issues, Date Rape, Established Relationship, Excessive Drinking, M/M, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Self-Blame, Self-Hatred, Semi-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Sexual Coercion, Sexual Injury, Trauma, Victim Blaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 09:18:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5200457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustJasper/pseuds/JustJasper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finally had what he could never have hoped for in Tevinter. It has taken Dorian all of one night to tarnish the only beautiful thing about himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shame

**Author's Note:**

> Please see the end notes for a more detailed (and spoilery) warning. 
> 
> Written for [this Kink Meme prompt](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/15866.html?thread=60013818): "TL;DR Dorian is taken advantage of, believes he's cheated on Bull and breaks it off. Bull is [not] accepting that bullshit."
> 
> I hope this reads more naturally than a PSA on consent, but a lot of stuff was important (and very cathartic) to get across.

**“And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in.” ― Graham Swift**

It's been weeks in the planning. Bothering Dagna, Dorian hiding his trips to the undercroft, not blurting out his plans, trying to temper his excitement; it's all gotten rather overwhelming. Surely the Bull has noticed something amiss, but hasn't said anything about it. He's rather good in that way, letting Dorian get on with things, knowing when it's something he ought to mention or not.

The day comes, a quiet morning in the Bull's room, an hour after a lazy fuck where they did little more than kiss and grind their hips together until they were both panting and sated; a good morning by any measure. Perfect, for what he means to do.

He retrieves the box and places it between them, opens the latch and lifts the lid. Silence is not the response Dorian expects.

“I've done something stupid, haven't I?” he says as heat climbs his neck and cheeks, making to close the lid of the box. The Bull stops him.

“Is this a dragon's tooth?” the Bull asks, still staring at the matching pendants. The tooth is a black ivory, set in gold in two halves. A weighty, considerable thing, that would look like a decent sized necklace on the Bull, and completely conspicuous on Dorian. He sort of likes that about them.

“From the dragon we killed in the Crow Fens.”

“Shit, kadan.” The Bull grins at him. “Where did you find out about this?”

“We have a few texts on qunari folklore. I thought perhaps it was a little twee of a custom, but it seemed rather... us.”

“Us?”

“You and I,” Dorian sighs. “Try as I might, it seems I'm hopelessly attached to you. I rather hoped this could come to symbolise our... union.”

The Bull laughs at that.

“Not union,” Dorian corrects quickly, “relationship. Our relationship. Our.. commitment.”

“Commitment?”

“Yes. I only intend to make one set of these, and you are the only man I intend to wear matching jewellery with. That is a commitment.”

“Sure is.” The Bull beams at him. “At least these colours will go with everything.”

“Nothing 'goes' with your hideous taste in trousers,” Dorian grouses, no conviction to it as he watches the Bull put one of the pendants around his neck. He takes the other and puts it on, settles the cool back of the tooth against his sternum.

“Kadan,” the Bull says, both a statement and an address as he leans across and takes Dorian's face in his hand to draw him close and kiss him.

“Amatus,” Dorian whispers in turn.

*

The man is nice. Certainly one of only a handful of visiting Orlesians that Dorian could stand to spend more than a few moments in the company of, especially when he procures them drinks at the quaint little affair going on in the great hall. A mixer of some kind, something Josephine has organised to tide the visitors over until the Inquisitor is back.

He's bored, is the thing. The Bull and the Chargers are out, Sera, Varric, Vivienne and Cole with the Inquisitor, and at least another three days from Skyhold. Blackwall and Solas are by and large terrible company in one-on-one interaction, Dorian has found. Chess with Cullen is more of a daytime affair, and one they use sparingly at that, lest they run out of conversation topics and accidentally stumble upon something exciting but tense and likely to result in heated debate, like mage-templar discussions. Dagna is a good conversationalist, but she too is busy, and without at least one of the usual faces, he's finding himself in need of distraction.

At one of the tables set around the edges of the hall, a small group dwindles until it's just the two of them. Michel is flirting, that much doesn't escape Dorian; he takes off his mask when he starts asking Dorian if he has a lover. He's passably handsome, face narrow and angular, with dark eyes and deeper crinkles at the corners of his eyes than Dorian has.

“You are here alone tonight, Dorian?”

Oh, he'd given up his name after the best part of a bottle of wine. Michel was holding his interest, so he'd deserved at least that for helping to pass a dull evening.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” he says, with a roll of his wrist. “The lady Montilyet is much too busy to let me steal her away and get her into trouble.”

“Trouble?” Michel laughs over the rim of his wine glass, eyes not leaving Dorian.

“Oh, not in any carnal sense. My interests in that arena are rather different,” he says, lets his eyes wander down the exposed skin at Michel's collar, and feels no shame for it. He fingers the dragon tooth hanging at his neck, and thinks fondly on the flash of memory it brings, of a kiss goodbye before the Chargers left on a job some weeks ago. The Bull would be proud.

“Is carnality a particular interest of yours?” Michel asks, as he tops up Dorian's wine glass from the bottle. Dorian is surely out-drinking him, but Michel seems not to mind.

Dorian laughs. “Well, it's certainly one to enjoy between more academic pursuits.”

“A smart man,” Michel says. “What is your area of interest, then, academically speaking?”

He's no mage, and Dorian steers clear of anything as controversial as necromancy, but Michel listens with genuine interest to Dorian speak of some of his magical studies. He touches only briefly on his work on time magic, a much too fraught thing to get into, but worth mention.

Michel in turn speaks of his work; he is an accountant, essentially, but his work out of Val Royeaux at least seems to give him interesting stories, so Dorian tries not to judge him too harshly.

“I have the most lovely bottle of Nevarran brandy in my suite,” Michel says, another glass of wine later.

“Ah.” Dorian smiles, and gives a little shrug. “My apologies if I've led you to assume we might...” He gestures, words failing him at last. He's done rather well up to now, he thinks. “But I am involved.”

“Involved?” Michel says, and then realisation dawns. “Oh.” He sighs, and he is disappointed, but he smiles and shrugs, and does not immediate seek to flee Dorian's company, which seems something of a miracle. “No matter. The night is not a waste, spending it in your company in this way alone.”

He pours the rest of the bottle of wine into Dorian's glass, and immediately flags down a server for another. Some small, sensible part of Dorian thinks he ought to decline, and make his excuses, else he is going to be nursing a dragon of a headache in the morning.

But all that awaits him is his bed, and Michel has proved entertaining company so far. A failed transition to something more carnal needn't dampen the night; Maker knows Dorian is practised with that, playing off miscalculated advances made discreetly at Tevinter functions.

“So,” Michel says, smiling easily. “You must finish the tale about the dragon fight. The qunari, you said he was on the beast's back?”

*

Michel smells like citrus. Dorian can smell it as he walks a few paces behind Dorian down the corridor, away from the overpowering smells of the hall.

“It's somewhere...” Dorian says. Michel couldn't remember his way to his guest room. Dorian had been too embarrassed to admit he wasn't entirely sure where the guests were housed, but he seems to have wobbled his way in the right direction. “Here?”

He gestures at the expanse of the corridor they've turned into with a flourish and a grin. Michel comes abreast, and nods.

“Ah yes, there's my room! How silly of me. Thank you!”

“It has been my pleasure,” Dorian says.

“You should let me thank you,” Michel says. “That Nevarran brandy is only a door away. I _promise_ I have no other motive but to thank you for the evening.”

Dorian considers him with a huff of breath. He's certainly been through the wine, though Dorian had rather hogged it, and Michel is loose and relaxed with the drink. He smiles, quirks an eyebrow in question.

Dorian himself is drunk, that much he knows. He had to brace his hand along the stone corridor once or twice to avoid veering off course. Drunkenness is not an unfamiliar state; many a night he stumbles from the tavern with a similarly inebriated crowd, often with the Bull steering him to one of their rooms and putting him to bed.

“Just a nightcap,” Dorian says, because thinking feels like it's taking entirely too long, “and then I must retire for the night.”

They drink brandy on the blue crushed velvet of the settee, and Michel tells him how he procured the bottle. Dorian is too drunk to follow it, but he knows when to smile and when to laugh, or at least knows how to follow the social leads Michel's tale gives him. He might pass out in a corridor on his way back to his room, at this rate.

When Dorian's glass is near-empty, and Michel's is still full, Michel eases himself into Dorian space, turns his face towards him and kisses him. _He's trying to drink the brandy from my mouth_ , Dorian thinks, quite ridiculously. It takes him a moment to work up to any kind of response, stunned as he is. He pulls away, a hand on Michel's chest.

“What was that?”

“A kiss,” Michel laughs.

“I thought,” he says, trying to gather _his_ thoughts, “you had no designs on me?”

“We know what a nightcap means, Dorian,” Michel says, and leans in and kisses him again. They are almost an even match, Michel perhaps a few inches shorter, but there is intensity in the kiss, even as Dorian turns his face away to escape it.

“It means a drink.” He makes to rise, to say his goodbyes and to leave. Michel holds him in place with a hand on his leg, and one at his neck. The insistence is implied more than shown, the touches only just firm, but Dorian feels the weight of expectation behind them.

“No need to be coy,” Michel says, as his hand moves and presses against Dorian's crotch through his leathers. “We know why you came here with me, hm?”

“I didn't come for this.” His attempt at squirming away is thwarted by Michel's insistent hand. At the merest touch, his body becomes a traitor.

“That's it,” Michel coos, as Dorian begins to harden under his hand. He always was easy after wine.

He can't _think_. He didn't lead Michel back to his room with intent, did he? He flirted, and he shared drinks, he leaned in close and he laughed at jokes that were only a little funny, and he.. he...

Michel is making quick work of the buckles on the front of his robe when Dorian comes back to himself. Surely he was only thinking for a moment, but Michel's shirt is long gone, and his lips feel swollen, like the kisses have become longer, deeper.

“I have to go,” Dorian says.

“Nonsense,” Michel says, opening his robe and pushing it off Dorian's shoulders. “We have all night. Sacremere, you are exquisite!”

“I am,” he laughs, too high and too loud. Michel kisses him again. When Michel's hand is not on his cock it flags, some small mercy from his body, though it's ready to betray him again when Michel squeezes him.

“Maker, I wanted to bend you over the table all night.”

Michel takes him to the edge of the bed, and Dorian _goes_.

“No,” he says, as Michel takes off his boots and his trousers and discards them on the floor. He shakes his head, trying to clear it, but it only makes his vision wobble precariously for a moment. “Stop this.”

“You make me feel good,” Michel says, hurrying out of the rest of his clothing, “and afterwards I'll return the favour.”

“I don't want this,” Dorian says, rounds out the vowels so he's being clear. He will see reason, surely. Michel turns him onto his stomach, moves his legs apart. The dragon tooth around Dorian's neck digs into his sternum.

“No more games.” Michel spits on his fingers, and then presses them against Dorian's hole. His blunt, near-dry cock after that.

“No, no no—ah! Ah!”

It ends mercifully quickly, with Michel's come on the back of his thighs. When he herds Dorian up the bed and takes his cock and twists his hand, his body can barely manage a response. Michel gives up after a few moments, and goes to fetch the brandy bottle from the settee. He offers it to Dorian without taking any for himself.

“I should go,” Dorian says.

“You're here now,” Michel says, pressing the bottle into Dorian's hand. “You can ride me in a little while. You can pretend to be that qunari, and I'll be the dragon you killed!” he laughs in what might be a good natured way. “Maybe your cock will cooperate more on the next go, my mage friend.”

Dorian necks a mouthful of brandy from the bottle.

When Michel tries to move him a while later, Dorian lolls over onto his front, feebly tries to reach back push him away so he can just slip into stupor. Undiscouraged, Michel takes him like that, attempts to ease the way with spit again and fucks him for much longer. Dorian's cock stirs against the sheets, and oh how he hates himself for that.

Afterwards, Michel rolls him over to get to his cock, strokes him as Dorian tries feebly to squirm away from the touch. Eventually, before Michel can loose patience again, Dorian spends himself over his stomach.

Blackness comes soon after.

*

He wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, with blood on the inside of his thighs.

It's been a long time since that happened—years, in fact—but he remembers the way his thighs stick together well enough to know the difference between blood and dried seed. That's pinching the skin of his backside, caught painfully in the hairs on the back of his thighs.

He's not prone to delicacy, but Tevinter never did lend itself to taking one's time with these things. Tevinter never did lend itself to caring. A handful of times he came away from trysts in a similar state, and felt the effect of them for days after.

Michel snores softly from the bed as Dorian retrieves his scattered clothing and dresses. He finds himself disappointed that he looks no less handsome in the dawn light just lighting the room through the curtains.

Dorian slips from the guest wing, and lets his feet lead him back to his room. Skyhold is just waking, and Dorian sees nobody who pays him any mind on his way, some small mercy to mask his shame.

In the privacy of his quarters, he takes off his clothes and melts chucks of conjured ice in his bathtub until the water is steaming, a little too hot for comfort, but steps into the bath regardless. His skin prickles with the heat, his body throbs. He takes a cloth and wets it, and then squats to clean between his legs.

The blood looks worse than it is, he knows. It's smeared between his thighs in the night for a much more dramatic effect, and now stains the cloth an over-dramatic red. It will only be a little tear, the result of a careless romp, and his body will heal. There'll be no evidence of what he's done, in a few weeks.

 _Bull will forgive me,_ he thinks as he sits down in the tub and closes his fist around the dragons tooth. Then: _No, he won't._ The Bull won't think he's done anything wrong, or anything he needs to be forgiven for. The Bull has made it perfectly clear that he has no problem in Dorian seeking his pleasure elsewhere, even if Dorian cannot be as unselfish in return.

But that was before the dragon tooth. Before a symbol, a commitment. It's no trinket, no mere fancy or battle trophy; taking it, having a hand in its design and its crafting, giving a half to the Bull and wearing his half openly, has imbued it with significance.

Significance he doesn't think includes the tolerance of him getting drunk and fucking a stranger while the Bull is away. As if everything that has enabled that perfect, shining moment to happen—where he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he and the Bull were something that _mattered_ —means less than a casual fuck, some base sating of drunken desire.

“I'm so stupid,” he tells the room.

He finally had what he could never have hoped for in Tevinter, and had declared it to the world, in a way. They wore their matching tokens for near a month, every time they saw them on each other a thrill. It has taken Dorian all of one night away from supervising company to tarnish the only beautiful thing about himself. He had been a fool to think he could have it at all.

*

Dorian is a coward. He knows if he tells the Iron Bull, he'll absolve him of his guilt. Dorian doesn't want to be absolved; even if it's a kindness, Dorian wouldn't deserve it. He doesn't deserve the Bull's consideration, or his understanding, or his forgiveness. He doesn't deserve the Bull.

He find the Bull in the tavern the day the Chargers return, in his usual spot where he watches the goings on. The Bull's hand is already on his necklace, thumb stroking over it before he even spots Dorian. Then the smile, the genuine, soft smile that the Bull has for him almost breaks Dorian's resolve.

He could tell him. He could promise to be better. Instead, he comes to a silent stop in front of him.

“Hey, kadan.”

Dorian takes the dragon tooth from around his neck and holds it tight in a fist at his side. The Bull's eyebrows, for however much they're a pair, inch up minutely.

“Katoh.”

For just a few seconds, Dorian thinks the Bull might protest. Hopes. He nods instead.

“Okay.”

No questions asked.

*

He keeps the dragon tooth under his pillow, because he is a despicable man. Sometimes at night he wonders what the Bull did with his half, because it's gone the next time Dorian sees him.

He doesn't wear it, but he carries it on him in the day, too. In the library, the weight of it reminds him of what he did, turns it into some kind of penance, to always be conscious of it. Suitably dramatic for the utter mess he's made of the only fully-fledged relationship he's ever had. The image is a striking one, in the lull of research: a fledgling Avaritia bird successful in first flight, only to dash itself on the rocks a day later because it saw something glittering in the sun and _wanted_.

Days become weeks so slowly. Dorian sleeps alone, and thinks of Michel. The sex was terrible, unmemorable but for the lasting ache it left in his body, and yet he had happily gone to his room, to his bed after an evening of conversation and wine. It was much like he was in Tevinter again, seeking fleeting, physical release at soirées and dull salons, with anyone who would tolerate his desires for an hour or two.

He'd thought of the Bull as he kissed Michel, and he hadn't left. He had damned them in that moment. He hasn't seen Michel since, and it's more than likely he's not even at Skyhold any longer.

He is only a little surprised when Cole makes himself known one night in the otherwise empty library, lit only by a magic orb of light above Dorian's table.

“You think you made a precious thing mean less,” Cole says, perching precariously on the railings.

“I did,” Dorian says, before he can think better of it. He opens his mouth to protest Cole's further interruption, but it occurs to him he hasn't noted down anything from the anthology he's studying in several hours. The ink in the quill between his fingers is likely dry. He sets it down, and then scrubs at his face with his hands, leaving his moustache crooked.

“You were hurt, and you think it's your fault,” Cole says, voice plaintive. “Because you think hurting is who you are.”

“Cole, stop it.”

“I don't understand. You don't think of it how it happened, but you make it hurt more and less at the same time.”

“I deserve—” Dorian presses his lips together. He's not doing this with Cole.

“You think you're bad. You think you stayed because you don't know how to care for a precious thing.”

“I stayed because I wanted to fuck someone. Because apparently I can't go a few weeks without.”

“He doesn't wait. He doesn't make it feel like you matter, no words, wanting, waiting until it can be good. He's not like The Iron Bull, but it's okay because you don't think you should have that. You think that's what you wanted when you went with wine in your belly, that you're bad.”

“Cole, please.”

“That's wrong,” Cole says. “You're thinking it wrong, that's not why, when you tumbled and turned and everything swam. You said no.”

Dorian slams his large book closed with a satisfying snap. He has to stop his mana from flaring and setting the library on fire.

“Do not _speak_ to me about this _again_!”

“But you're hurting, I want to help.”

“I don't need you to _help_ me,” Dorian hisses, turns on his heel, and leaves for his chambers.

*

Dorian pretends he isn't counting the weeks since he fucked things up. It's easier if he pretends he isn't tracking the time that passes, if he makes some attempt to live the fantasy that the days where he can't go to the Bull and speak to him, can't drink with him, can't follow him to bed, that those days are easy.

When the Bull turns up at his room, he takes a long breath in through his nose. _Andraste's arse_ , this is not what he needs.

“Hey,” the Bull says.

“What is it you want?” He wants the words to hurt, so the Bull might leave and spare them both. He doesn't.

“I know you ended things,” the Bull says, “and I respect that, but I think maybe you need to talk it out. No hard feelings, I promise.”

Perhaps the Bull truly does want to help, or perhaps he wants an explanation; he certainly deserves one. Dorian lets him into his room.

“How're you doing?” the Bull asks, settling to lean against Dorian's chest of drawers. Dorian puts himself as far away as he dares without making the distance between them seem deliberate.

“I'm fine.”

“I don't think you are,” the Bull says. “If you need to talk this out so you can move on, you know I’ll listen.”

Of course he will. The Iron Bull is a good man, to friends and former _somethings_ alike. The Bull deserves to hear it, even if his reasons for ruining what they were are shameful and pathetic.

“I wanted us to be lovers,” Dorian says.

The Bull tips his head. “We were.”

“Yes, well.” Dorian exhales slowly through his nose. “I wanted you to be the only man I went to bed with.”

“That would have been okay,” the Bull says carefully, the smallest smile playing on his mouth.

“Except that the moment you were away, I fucked someone else.”

“Dorian,” he says, in way he might talk to a hart to keep from spooking it. “If you wanted to have sex with other people, that's fine.”

“But I _didn't_. I just wanted you, but I fucked someone else anyway, because I could. Because I was bored, and he wasn't terribly bad company, and I was drunk.”

“Drunk.” The Bull frowns.

Dorian laughs. “You can't honestly say you're surprised, surely?”

“How drunk?”

“Completely sloshed,” Dorian says, the edge of a hysterical laugh at his voice. “You know how I am.”

“What happened?”

Dorian folds his arms over his chest and considers where to start. That he was lonely, and bored? That he kept drinking instead of retiring to his bed alone? It all seems so pathetic, the reasons for betraying the Bull, every moment when he could have chosen not to, and he didn't make the right choice.

“We drank wine. A lot of wine. I turned him down, but I just kept right on drinking. He couldn't remember how to reach the guest wing, so I showed him, of course. When he invited me inside for a nightcap, I went. Nevarran brandy, you see. You know I can't resist something _expensive_.”

Much as he expected, the Bull is just watching him, the only expression one that shows he's listening. Judgement would be easier, Dorian thinks.

“He kissed me, and I told him I didn't stay for that, but I didn't leave. I let him undress us. He took me to bed, and I went.” Dorian shrugs. It feels such a terrible justification for his inaction. “I made some protest, but I was—I stayed. I let him fuck me. Twice.”

The Bull has gone very still.

“What do you mean 'some protest'?”

Dorian shrugs. “I told him to stop, and then I let him have me.”

“You told him to stop,” the Bull says. “He didn't?”

“Of course he didn't!” Dorian snaps. “I stayed! I could have left. He didn't force me to stay, Bull. I went with him, I drank with him, and I could have left any time. I _didn't_.”

“Did you _want_ to have sex with him?”

“What does that _matter_?” Dorian asks. His chest feels tight, making breathing painful. “I let him. I was drunk but I could have stopped him, I could have walked out, I could have burnt him to ashes! I was wearing this, and I let him fuck me!”

Dorian scrambles for the dragon tooth in his pocket, and brandishes it on its chain. The Bull's eyes flicker to it, and then back to Dorian.

“Because no matter what I want to have, I can't. I can't do it. I'll ruin you. And you'll forgive me for it, because you are too _good_.”

“You want—” the Bull pauses, like he's gathering himself. H doesn't look away from Dorian. “You want me to be angry at you for being raped.”

“What?” Dorian hisses. It isn't that, it can't be _that_. Choices that end badly are Dorian's speciality, but he's not a _victim_ of them. “He didn't rape me, I let him!”

“You told him to stop, and he didn't, Dorian!”

Ice forms in jagged spikes at Dorian's palms.

“I COULD HAVE LEFT!”

He takes a breath, and concentrates on brushing the shards of ice from his hands against his thighs, breaking them away to slivers on the floor.

“He should have stopped, Dorian,” the Bull says. His voice is strained, like it might crack and break. His one eye shines wetly. Dorian wants to be sick. “The moment you told him you didn't want to kiss him, or to have sex with him, he should have stopped.”

“But I _could_ have stopped him, if I really wanted to. I didn't.”

“You shouldn't have to fight, Dorian. He should have stopped. You said no, but he kept going. He forced himself on you.”

“I didn't resist, Bull,” Dorian says weakly, tears finally spilling down his cheeks. Why must he cry? He is such an ugly crier. He's ashamed enough without having to deal with how his lip curls and his face crumbles when he cries. “He didn't have to force me to do anything. I let him.”

“But you didn't _want_ to do it.”

“So I did it anyway! I let him bend me over and fuck me dry because I'm not a good man! Because I'm so selfish that I couldn't restrain myself! I stayed, and he made me _come_.”

Dorian covers his mouth and nose with both hands and sobs, the cord of the necklace still twisted around his fingers. That's the admission that breaks him, that he validated what happened by finding pleasure in it. He said he didn't want it, meaningless sentiment to mask that he inevitably did it anyway. Just like he had with the Bull, pretended not to want him and then...

He goes to his knees, taken off his feet with the surge of vicious hate he feels for himself. He convinced himself he didn't want those hands or that body against him, but he'd still let it happen, had still found release, and exposed his own lie with it. He had wanted to be with the Bull alone, and at the first temptation he'd let someone else have him.

The Bull joins Dorian on his knees, dropping hard onto his good knee and then his bad.

“I'm going to touch you, kadan,” he says, giving Dorian the opportunity to object. Selfishly, Dorian doesn't. The Bull takes him in his arms and holds him against his chest, enveloping him. Oh, how he's missed being held.

“It's my fault,” Dorian cries pitifully, body shaking with his sobs. “I ruined it! I just wanted _you_ , I _only_ wanted you, and I couldn't even be true to that!”

“You didn't do anything wrong.” The Bull's voice is pitched low, and his arms squeeze around Dorian, one massive hand stroking over his back.

Dorian sniffs and gulps for breath, urging himself to stop _crying_ and making such a scene.

“I betrayed us.” His voice is small with the words, as he lets his hands fall away from his face.

“You didn't betray me by being _raped_.”

“Bull, please,” Dorian whines, sobbing again.

“Just because he made you come, doesn't mean he didn't force you. It's not your fault, none of it. It doesn't matter if you didn't leave, or didn't fight him. You said no. That was all you should have had to do.”

Dorian almost asks how the he can possibly not blame him for what he's done, but the Bull kisses his head and it undoes him again; he cries in the Bull's arms while he holds his half of dragon tooth between his hands.

He doesn't deserve the Bull, after doing this to himself.

They kneel in quiet for a long time, only the sound of Dorian's sobs slowly turning to hitched, hiccuping breathing. Dorian listens to the Bull's heartbeat and his steady breaths, and the Bull's hold doesn't slacken.

“I—” he begins, swallows, and reconsiders. The Bull doesn't hate him. The Bull doesn't even think it's his fault. “I don't know why I didn't fight.”

“You were drunk,” the Bull murmurs. “Maybe you did. Maybe you couldn't. It's not your fault.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You don't need to be, kadan. You did nothing wrong, I promise you.”

*

Dorian doesn't even have to ask, _will you take me back?_ The Bull starts wearing his dragon tooth again, so Dorian does too. Things go back to how they were, mercifully normal. They fight side by side, and they drink in the tavern, and they retire to the Bull's room and hold each other and sleep. Soon, they get back to having great sex, too.

And sometimes they talk about what happened.

There are large parts of the night he doesn't remember, like what happened between the kiss and being undressed, but the Bull listens. He listens to Dorian tell it in bits and pieces as the days pass, in more details as he remembers more, or admits things he didn't feel worth noting.

The Bull tells him it wasn't his fault, never unsure of that. Dorian begins to wonder if he's right, and whether the very way Dorian thinks is warped.

“He got you drunk,” the Bull says, in one of these conversations.

“I got myself drunk.”

“I think he made sure you drunk more than he did. I think he wanted you drunk, because people lose their inhibition to the drink.”

“I'm a grown man, Bull. I could have stopped drinking.”

“Yeah, you could have. And maybe he never would have hurt you, if any one of a shit load of things went differently. None of that makes it your fault that this happened to you.”

The conversations aren't hard, not universally, and the Bull lets Dorian be the one to bring it up; he doesn't even ask Dorian to tell him Michel's name. He can't seem to help thinking about it though, even though it's long over, and things with the Bull get better each day. They wear matching dragons teeth, and people refer to them together more often than individually. It's a tiny thrill, to be so acknowledged.

He thinks a lot about Tevinter, and the sex he's had. He thinks about the times the choice he made wasn't really a choice at all, compared to the freedom he finds in his new life. It shocks him, to think how much sex he's acquiesced too, rather than enthusiastically pursued. He'd never thought to expect more.

It's quite the upheaval, to reconsider a lifetime’s worth of understanding. But the Bull is there to talk about it when Dorian feels the need. He's there for all Dorian's needs, actually. It's hard to do the same in kind for a man like the Bull, but Dorian tries, by the Maker he does.

Weeks become months. The Inquisition spurs change, and Dorian and the Bull are right there at the vanguard of it.

Eventually it's almost a half year since it happened, Corypheus is a month dead, and the Bull and Dorian share the shade of a tree in Skyhold's garden. Dorian sits between the Bull's knees, book open in his own lap with parchment and ink to hand, finally convinced to bring his work outside to enjoy the short-lived warmth.

“I shouldn't have told you what he looked like,” Dorian says, after he looks up to see the Bull watching a gaggle of Orlesians nearby, new in with the latest trade caravans.

“Who?”

“The man who hurt me. You look for him in all the new arrivals.”

The Bull affirms he understands the euphemism with a small noise. Dorian knows now what happened to him, after a long time of learning what it truly was. He has even given it a name a few times, admitted to himself and aloud only to the Iron Bull, that he was _raped_. But acknowledging it with the word is painful, and dancing around it makes things easier to bear. Indeed, the single time he though of it in a possessive term— _“let's not dwell on my rapist, perhaps?”_ —had almost seen him lose himself to panic and the desire to climb out of his own skin. He does not wish to claim ownership over that memory, or give the man that title, like he belongs somehow to his life.

The truth is that Dorian too looks for him in all the new Orlesian arrivals, or any man of vaguely Michel's build and colouring. Existence and whatever powers govern it haven't seen fit to make things so narratively just that he might reappear. His face is never in the crowds, Dorian gets no convenient opportunity to confront him and demand he admit the truth, or to burn him to ash in revenge.

Somewhere, Michel likely lives, and may not even think of Dorian. He rather hopes he doesn't, that instead the shade of his skin and the shape of his body, the way he looks undressed is forgotten. He longs to be unremarkable to that man.

“We could probably find him,” the Bull says. “If you wanted to.”

“I know,” Dorian says, leaning back against the Bull's chest, notes abandoned. “If I saw him today, I think I'd kill him.”

“I'd help.”

“I know,” he repeats, chuckling darkly. “But I don't want him to matter that much. I don't want to care about him in any capacity. So we are not expending any resources, or any energy chasing him down for my revenge.”

“Alright, kadan,” the Bull says, leaning down to kiss Dorian's cheek. His heart swells at the very idea that if Dorian wanted that, to take chase and bring about bloody vengeance, that the Bull would be there with a cloth for him to wipe the spatter off himself.

“Now, how about I read you a little of this?” Dorian says, hefting the large book up as he raises his knees. “It's a lot of magical theory, but this author seems to rather enjoy very evocative descriptions of human anatomy.”

The Bull laughs, his large chest rumbling with the rolling sound. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

“I'm glad we have have shared interests, amatus.”

“And maybe later, I'll show you how _evocative_ I can be.”

“I rather hoped you might suggest that.”

**“Trauma ruptures and hollows. Compassion mends and fills; love heals.” ― Na'ama Yehuda**

**Author's Note:**

> Detailed warning: Dorian is drunk and is raped by a man (not Bull) he drinks with, by means of coercion and force, the event itself being semi-graphic and clearly non-consensual. The encounter includes Dorian being forced to orgasm. Afterwards, Dorian is unable to recognise that he isn't at fault, blaming himself, not understanding that he was coerced or forced, due to a mixture of being very drunk at the time, and his own internalised misunderstanding of how good consent works.
> 
> Sacremere = made up Orlesian exclamation, "sacred mother"  
> Avaritia bird = avarice bird, a made-up animal like a magpie that is fabled in Tevinter for it's greed for material (often man-made) things.
> 
> "Because you think hurting is who you are" is a direct lift from one of Cole and Dorian's banters, and it's meant to be a repeated statement, referencing that exchange having happened.


End file.
